


This I Choose To Do

by Kes



Series: Thor 2 Rewritten: The Shaded Tree [3]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Aether, Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-11 13:23:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a film that wasn't quite Thor: The Dark World, Dr. Jane Foster went willing through the portal into the dark hall beyond the worlds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This I Choose To Do

**Author's Note:**

> (Because they missed so many opportunities with Jane. This may be part of a series, or it may not.)

The most earth-shattering part of it all, for her, is the way that her hunches have not erred. For all she was told in a thousand different ways from a thousand different faces that you couldn’t just walk into the desert and expect to find truth in the eye of the storm, she has done that. For all she was taught to revere the solid, the concrete, the graspable, she has held the stars in her hands. For all she was dismissed as an irrational woman, unfitting in the field and unbefitting on the page, she has achieved marvels that none of those who doubted her could have dreamed. For all she was told to be cautious, hold back, let it go, her strike had paid her back sevenfold.

Jane Foster has learned a lot about her gut, these past two years.

Unfortunately, she has also learned a lot about spies and government funding and how very difficult it is to follow your gut when you’re being kept on an increasingly tight leash. Every time she thinks she has a star to follow, a signal ready for development, SHIELD tweaks things and puts it far, far out of her grasp again. When Erik asks her to come to London, she accepts, but SHIELD’s willingness to allow it puts her on edge. (Her discomfort is nothing to do with the worry that her mother will hear that they’re in the same city. Nothing at all.) After a week she’s yelling at their answerphones telling them to give her access to the research Erik wanted her to have even if Erik himself is mysteriously off-grid. After two weeks, she’s decided to bill them for all the icecream she wants and treat it as a vacation.

She wonders if everyone gets this way – if you start out chasing dreams and end up cynical, bitter, barred from your passions by the world. If everyone’s stars turn out to be weather balloons that, deflated, sink into a marsh and shortcircuit.

When Darcy comes upstairs with the obscurometer, she’s staring glumly at five unread emails on her personal email account, all of them over two months old. Two from Mom. One from Don. Two from old college friends. The other tab is open at the dataset she’s supposed to be working on, boring, mundane data that she wants to scream is futile on its own. She could analyse it to death and be no nearer to understanding Yggdrasill – she’s calling it that because it really annoyed Dr Morlan, and his annoyed face has been giving her joy since she was independent enough not to fear it – because it doesn’t have the letters to ask the right question.

“It’s malfunctioning,” she says, dully, and slams it against the table. It’s been so long. The star’s gone out, the magic’s dead, and did she dream it all anyway? A thousand headlines about the alien menace say no, but she knows as well as anyone how distorted the truth is when seen through the camera lens.

“Thought you’d do something a bit more scientific, like, at least take the back off or something.”

Pretending that she was going to all along, she inserts her fingernails into the crack and pulls it apart. Nothing wrong. She half-built this, she would know – she touches the screen for the code. All in order. And yet – maybe. Quickly she checks her professional email – nothing from SHIELD. “Let’s go.”

On the way she tries to get through to Erik again. Sometimes she finds herself looking at the SHIELD secret accounts she gets half her funding from and hates it, digs her fingernails into her palms in lieu of clawing at the green paper prison, hates them for what they did to him. It’s still classified and she still doesn’t know precisely what happened, but she can see through their shit and there is no way they were playing on the level with any of them. Erik doesn’t pick up.

How did Darcy even pick up an intern? She fends off his stuttered but respectful greeting by shoving the receptor unit into his arms and striding off towards the building, ignoring the ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’ sign. It’s not cold, but her hands are tingling all the same, her heart beating a little faster.

Inside it’s eerie, made the more so by the cautious footsteps of the children, but it barely registers. The signal looks like her target, looks promising, looks like her star – and SHIELD are nowhere in sight. The truck confirms it, and she sprints up the stairs behind the children, red boots clomping on the brick, gut twisting inside her and pointing the way.

The anomaly is like nothing she’s seen before, but no-one has experience with these things – still, she thinks she sees a faint glimmer of blue, and that looks familiar. The obscurometer certainly seems to recognise it, spiking relentlessly as they throw all sorts of debris through the two. She’s reminded of _The Last Continent_ , and smiles, eyes burning.

That isn’t it, though. There are growing readings on the obscurometer, readings that look like another similar phenomenon – she has to catch one forming. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she says over her shoulder as she half-runs towards the source, somehow avoiding tripping on all the debris scattered across the floor. This place feels emptier than it should, for all the cheerful voices of children and youths who have forgotten they aren’t children coming from behind her. Suddenly she feels old.

There it is. There’s no mistaking it, even without the frantic display changes of the obscurometer; a leaf is whipped up by a breeze and vanishes, and there’s that faint blue mist as well. It reminds her of that HQ video Darcy managed to illegally get for her of the portal in New York.

Cautiously she picks up a stick and pushes it through, examines the point it vanishes carefully. She can’t see through it; on the other side could be anything. She spits on the next stick she uses, lets it hang, and pulls it back. Whatever lies beyond has a downwards gravitational pull roughly equivalent to that of Earth, and it doesn’t appear to have ripped the saliva apart as space would. Her heart is pounding in her throat.

She could go home and get a barrage of equipment and come back, but then – then there would be time for SHIELD to catch wind of it. The situation could change. Anything could happen. Her star is pulsing just beyond that shimmering anomaly, perfectly in time with the thump of her heart in her chest. _I will know, I must._ Slowly, whispering that her gut had been right before, she touches it.

Half of her finger vanishes. She snatches it back – unharmed. Nothing. Then she sticks her head through and tries to breathe – nothing strange. This is reckless, this is stupid, and she knows it – never trust a strange atmosphere! – but Asgard must have the same atmosphere as Earth, since Thor was fine, and this is surely Yggdrasill. She opens her eyes and steps the whole way through.

Around her shafts of pale, unsettlingly greenish light illuminate the dark cavern – or is it a hall? She almost expects Durin’s Bane to rise before her in all its terrible glory – in ghostly fashion. Behind her the portal stands intact, and she checks the obscurometer. It will warn her if the portal starts to destabilise.

Before her stands a great pillar, part of it floating on the other, surrounded with – no. It can’t be. She crouches, a gasp catching in her throat. It is. The design is etched into her memory, she knows it like she knows the constellations. Asgard. Asgard woz ere. The thought makes her smile, and then she remembers Thor, and it’s drowned in a wave of something that might be embarrassment, regret, or the refusal to feel either. Placing her boots carefully, she advances towards the pillar.

Something about it makes her skin crawl. It doesn’t look Asgardian in the slightest – it looks older, harsher. And something is moving in the gap. She leans closer to look.

Creeping, oily-red threads are pooling in thin air. The obscurometer isn’t even reading them, but she can feel something off them, a thing that is cold, void, antithetical to the warmth in her blood. Still she watches, fascinated.

It spins. The Bifrost spun, before it touched – she leaps backwards, but too late.

This Jane Foster will not remember, but that she chose, she will.


End file.
